Laboratory based surveillance of travel-related Shigella sonnei and Shigella flexneri in Alberta from 2002 to 2007

Between 2002 and 2007, travel related cases of Shigella sonnei and S. flexneri in Alberta, Canada were acquired from Central America, the Indian subcontinent and North America. Of this group, resistance to ciprofloxacin and nalidixic acid was identified in isolates from patients who had travelled to the Indian subcontinent. This study provides a Canadian perspective to a growing body of literature linking ciprofloxacin and nalidixic acid resistance to travel to the Indian subcontinent

Rationale and design of an independent randomised controlled trial evaluating the effectiveness of aripiprazole or haloperidol in combination with clozapine for treatment-resistant schizophrenia

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>One third to two thirds of people with schizophrenia have persistent psychotic symptoms despite clozapine treatment. Under real-world circumstances, the need to provide effective therapeutic interventions to patients who do not have an optimal response to clozapine has been cited as the most common reason for simultaneously prescribing a second antipsychotic drug in combination treatment strategies. In a clinical area where the pressing need of providing therapeutic answers has progressively increased the occurrence of antipsychotic polypharmacy, despite the lack of robust evidence of its efficacy, we sought to implement a pre-planned protocol where two alternative therapeutic answers are systematically provided and evaluated within the context of a pragmatic, multicentre, independent randomised study.</p> <p>Methods/Design</p> <p>The principal clinical question to be answered by the present project is the relative efficacy and tolerability of combination treatment with clozapine plus aripiprazole compared with combination treatment with clozapine plus haloperidol in patients with an incomplete response to treatment with clozapine over an appropriate period of time. This project is a prospective, multicentre, randomized, parallel-group, superiority trial that follow patients over a period of 12 months. Withdrawal from allocated treatment within 3 months is the primary outcome.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>The implementation of the protocol presented here shows that it is possible to create a network of community psychiatric services that accept the idea of using their everyday clinical practice to produce randomised knowledge. The employed pragmatic attitude allowed to randomly allocate more than 100 individuals, which means that this study is the largest antipsychotic combination trial conducted so far in Western countries. We expect that the current project, by generating evidence on whether it is clinically useful to combine clozapine with aripiprazole rather than with haloperidol, provides physicians with a solid evidence base to be directly applied in the routine care of patients with schizophrenia.</p> <p>Trial Registration</p> <p><b>Clincaltrials.gov Identifier</b>: NCT00395915</p

An updated sediment source areas inventory in the Rio Cordon catchment (Dolomites)

This study presents an inventory of sediment source areas updated to 2016 of the Rio Cordon catchment, a small headwater basin located in the Eastern Italian Alps. The aim of the 2016 inventory was to update an old sediment source areas dataset dating back to 2006, built using LiDAR-derived geomorphometric parameters interpretation and field survey, in order to evaluate the geomorphic changes occurred in the last 10 years in the catchment. The new inventory was realized by means of an extensive field survey campaign conducted with a mobile GIS mounted on a rugged notebook integrating a GPS receiver. Pictures of individual or collective sediment source areas were also acquired in order to integrate the GIS dataset and to better define their current status of activity. The images were also used for a comparison with the images acquired in 2006 to identify the evolution or stabilization of each sediment source area. The identification and delimitation of large and/or unreachable areas was carried out in the office by interpreting aerial photo images (Bing satellite images and Web Map Services for AGEA 2009-2012 aerial photographs, compared with the old LiDAR-derived high resolution images used for the 2006 sediment source inventory). The comparison with the previous inventory shows that several old sediment sources resulted totally stabilized indicating a general decrease of erosion processes in the catchment. In contrast, some new sediment source areas were identified. They were mainly related to a very recent rock fall that took place in July 2016 in the Lastoni di Formin group and many new shallow landslides were found in the upper part of small Rio Cordon tributary where a small debris flow event occurred in 2012. \ua9 Societ\ue0 Geologica Italiana, Roma 2017

Deposition of Aluminium Nitride films by Plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition

International audienc

Accelerating prediction of chemical shift of protein structures on GPUs: Using OpenACC.

Experimental chemical shifts (CS) from solution and solid state magic-angle-spinning nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra provide atomic level information for each amino acid within a protein or protein complex. However, structure determination of large complexes and assemblies based on NMR data alone remains challenging due to the complexity of the calculations. Here, we present a hardware accelerated strategy for the estimation of NMR chemical-shifts of large macromolecular complexes based on the previously published PPM_One software. The original code was not viable for computing large complexes, with our largest dataset taking approximately 14 hours to complete. Our results show that serial code refactoring and parallel acceleration brought down the time taken of the software running on an NVIDIA Volta 100 (V100) Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) to 46.71 seconds for our largest dataset of 11.3 million atoms. We use OpenACC, a directive-based programming model for porting the application to a heterogeneous system consisting of x86 processors and NVIDIA GPUs. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach in systems of increasing complexity ranging from 100K to 11.3M atoms

HUMAN GASTRIC LIPASE

Ninety percentofthe dietary lipids in humans are triglycerides which constitute the essential part of the 100g to 150g daily fat intake in industrialized countries. It was thoughtuntil recently that the hydrolysis of dietary triglycerides began in the intestinal lumen and was catalysed exclusively by pancreatic lipase. Studies on gastrointestinal lipolysis have underestimated several importantpoints, particularly the role of gastric lipolysis. It is now well established that Human Gastric Lipase (HGL), is the first lipolytic enzyme involved in dietary fat digestion. HGL originates entirely from the fundic mucosa. Nolipolytic activity was detected in the lingual, pharyngeal or oesophagus areas. Using immunocytolocalization techniques, cells producing HGLwereidentified as the chief cells of gastric fundic glands already known to biosynthesize pepsin. HGL was purified to electrophoretic homogeneity (MW = 50 kDa)from gastric juice. It is a glycoprotein with a glycan moiety amounting about 15 to 20 % ofthe total protein weight. The complete amino acid sequence of HGL,derived from cDNA sequence, shows 80 % homology with rat lingual lipase. No structural homology exists between human gastric lipase and pancreatic lipase, except the G-X-S-X-G sequence found in otherlipases andserine esterases. This sequence containsa serine analogousto the essential Ser- 152 in human pancreatic lipase. HGL contains one free sulfhydryl group whichis essential to the expressionoflipaseactivity. HGL hydrolyses short chain (tributyrin) and long chain (Intralipide) triacylglycerols at similar rates. HGL activity is very dependentupon the interfacial tension between triacylglycerol and water. In the presence of amphiphiles such as bile salts or alimentary proteins, the tributyrin-waterinterfacial tension decreases and HGLis activated. Thus HGLis capable of hydrolyzing triglyceride emulsionsin the presence ofbile salts concentration prevailing in the upper small intestine and in the presence of alimentary proteins. These observations could explain the high dietary lipid absorption observed underpancreatic lipase deficiency. In vitro studies showed that prehydrolysis by HGLofIntralipide emulsion enable it to be subsequently hydrolyzed by humanpancreatic lipase. Fatty acid liberated by HGL probablytriggerthe later action of pancreatic lipase by changing the interfacial tension